My new Mixed Tape plugin

I am about to release a new plugin for WordPress. I am calling it WordPress Mixed Tape (WP Mixed Tape). If you have no idea what a mixed tape (mix tape) is, well, take a little trip back in time with me. Back in the day (let’s say the 1980’s), [W:cassette tapes] where the way taking your music with you. The [W:8-track tape] had gone the way of the [W:Dodo] and record [W:albums] were not portable. If those terms seem foreign to you, I included Wikipedia links to help you understand a little better. The great thing about tapes were that you could copy them to another tape. And, if you didn’t particularly like all the songs on a tape, you could copy tracks or part of tracks off of one tape and put it on another. You could even put your own voice recording or other recordings on to the tape.

Of course, this lead to people making their own full tapes for different purposes. One of the best or worst purposes for mixed tapes was for wooing someone. If you had a crush on someone or had been dating them for a period of time, you could show your love by copying a bunch of different songs that related to your emotional attachment to the other person onto a mixed tape. You could also be creative and add your own commentary in between tracks to show how that particular song meant so much to you about the current situation. For better or for worse, mixed tapes either helped or hurt the lovelorn and their situation. In today’s digital age, mixed tapes are now replaced by CDs (if you are legally allowed to make them now). But, even CDs are going away, since people can download music directly. So, what is a person supposed to do now to make a mixed tape? Well, you write a blog post as a mixed tape.

You are probably wondering how I came up with this idea. Well, Dean Logic is always all over the place, but there was a focus for this.

I was reading a coupe of posts on Gizmodo about the Windows PC commercial where “Lauren” buys a laptop for under $1000 and keeps the change. The Apple Fan Boys on Gizmodo didn’t appreciate Lauren’s selection. Not really caring about what her selection was, I was thinking I could write her an open letter stating that I didn’t care what she bought, because she’s cute. Then I started thinking that it would be great it I could make the post into a Mixed Tape. And that’s how this came about.

Basically, you add tracks to your post as you write. The idea would be that the tracks correspond to that particular part of the post. And then you add a tag to add the play list to the post with the name of your mixed tape, because very good mixed tape has a label. The code goes through and converts the track and play list tags and presto! You have a post that is also a mixed tape.

Now, to work on my open letter/mixed tape post for Lauren.